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Soooo, Honda have brought out their new Civic. And, Maverick that I am, I’m going to say something slightly controversial: I think it looks dull. When the last-gen model came out six years ago, the looks weren’t to everyone’s tastes. But you have to say, it didn’t look like anything else on the road at the time. But the novelty of that Civic began to wear off surprisingly quickly, to the point where I think it now looks quite dated and so the new one needed to re-invent the wheel again. And, in my opinion, it hasn’t. It doesn’t help that Honda suited up the test car that the world’s press drove in a lime green that was last seen adorning an HR-V in the late 90s. But the front fascia is just…..nothingy. It has hints of the new Subaru Impreza (dull) and then some vague attempt at a Vauxhall Ampera-style moulded grille/bumper. But that all works together to make a sigh of a design.

No, I’ll tell you what it looks like and why that offends me. It looks like a concept car from the 90s. You know, those ones that pointed at an exciting, dynamic future for car design, but were ultimately hemmed in by the fact that the designs were still necessarily of their time. It just doesn’t look fresh enough and, for reasons mentioned in yesterday’s post as well as others, that’s very soon not going to be good enough. There are grumblings in the automotive world about Toyota also straying from the path, with the new Yaris receiving wide-scale raspberry noises and thumbs down. We all want to see Japan succeed after what happened there earlier this year. But to do that, they’re going to have to step up.